The Capitol from the Reflecting Pool. Photo: Architect of the Capitol, a United States government work.
On Sunday this newsletter set out what a Democratic House could and could not do, and the Associated Press has since called both chambers for the Democrats. This special edition is on what the new majorities mean for the Forum’s work, and it is free to every reader.
Democrats won the House and the Senate on Tuesday. The Associated Press called both chambers before 3 a.m. Eastern: at least seven Senate seats taken from Republicans, in Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine and the two Carolinas, and two dozen House districts. By Wednesday afternoon the Senate stood at 54 seats for the Democratic caucus to 44 for the Republicans, with two races open. In Mississippi, Scott Colom led Cindy Hyde-Smith by 65 votes with 96 percent of the vote in, and the state has no formal recount process, though a challenger can ask a court for one. In Alaska, Mary Peltola led Dan Sullivan by 626 with 74 percent in, and a ranked-choice tabulation is scheduled for November 18 if no one passes 50 percent. CBS had the House at 229 Democrats to 138 Republicans at 1:37 p.m. The AP listed 59 House races it had not yet called. The question now is what the Democrats will do with it.
It has been a good two years. The campaign against Islamist organizations in America was run by executives, governors and prosecutors, and what they did stands. On November 24, 2025 the White House ordered the Muslim Brotherhood’s chapters reviewed for designation. State and Treasury listed four of them in January and March. Texas designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, and the Brotherhood on November 18 of last year. Florida followed on September 29. Indiana wrote a designation power into law this spring, and Tennessee now denies licenses to entities whose officers support a listed terrorist group. In May a federal judge ordered the CAIR Foundation to name its foreign donors. Twelve people are charged in Michigan over a campaign of threats and vandalism against Jewish and Israel-linked targets, marked with red handprints. On June 9 Health and Human Services opened an inquiry into barring CAIR from its grants, and nine House members, citing the Forum’s July report on $80 million in such money, asked it to go further. The USAID inspector general’s office, which has referred more than 100 UNRWA officials, is still at work, and a Risch-Shaheen amendment would keep it, as the Forum asked. None of this was a vote in Congress, so the new majorities cannot reverse it with one. The one act a ballot could reach is the Texas proclamation, and that state now has a new governor.
A Democratic Congress holds the gavels, the confirmations and the money. It does not hold the veto. The Democratic caucus will have at least 54 seats. An override needs 67, and the most the Senate has voted against the war on any day this year is 50. So the shape of the war is still the President’s to set, and he has eight weeks before the new chairmen have subpoenas. The aid to Israel, which he said on Tuesday ends in December, will be written by a Congress whose House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has already published his terms. And the organizations that spent two years answering Republican committees now face chairmen of the other party. CAIR welcomed the change on Wednesday. Its exit-poll release said “Congress has a mandate,” and the mandate it listed includes “stop enabling Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.” CAIR’s executive director Nihad Awad said of Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan that “Anti-Muslim hate was on the ballot and it failed.”
“Republican governors, Democratic attorneys general, and presidential administrations of opposing parties reached the same conclusion about CAIR.”
Two chambers can do three things one cannot: confirm, control the floor and write the money. A measure disapproving an arms sale, or one ordering forces withdrawn under the 1973 war-powers law, can now pass both chambers. Each then goes to the President. In his first term he vetoed two such resolutions and three disapprovals of sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the Senate sustained all five. Chris Coons is in line to chair Foreign Relations, with Jeanne Shaheen retiring. Jack Reed is in line for Armed Services, Patty Murray for Appropriations and Sheldon Whitehouse for Judiciary. In the House, Gregory Meeks is in line for Foreign Affairs, Rosa DeLauro for Appropriations, Adam Smith for Armed Services, Jamie Raskin for Judiciary and Bobby Scott for Education and Workforce.
Two chambers cannot end the war or the designations. The money for fiscal 2027 is being written now, by the Congress elected in 2024. The continuing resolution runs to December 11. The House passed its State Department bill in July with Israel’s $3.3 billion set as a floor, and the Senate has approved none of the twelve. If the outgoing majority finishes the 2027 bills, the first appropriations Democrats write will be for fiscal 2028, next spring. If it leaves them, the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote last week, the new majority may prefer to settle 2027 itself in January. Chris Murphy said on October 28 what Senate Democrats will seek in whichever bill comes first: “we want to fund the Department of Defense, but we are not going to fund the Department of Defense if it’s funding this war.” A provision like that needs the President’s signature or two-thirds of both chambers. Congress can undo a foreign terrorist designation only by statute. The Treasury listings depend on a national emergency that Congress could end only by joint resolution. Both routes go through the President’s desk.
On Monday night American forces struck a newly built anti-aircraft site on Iran’s Qeshm Island, in the Strait of Hormuz. The President called it on Tuesday “just a minor attack,” adding “It wasn’t war.” By Wednesday the administration was saying so itself. Vice President Vance wrote on X: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.” He listed, citing a pollster, what the voters who left the party said would bring them back: “1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel.” The President, asked about the post, said it was “largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short-term,” and went on: “if I had it to do again, I’d have to do it again. Because long-term, it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.” Asked whether he had said the war would end after the midterms, he answered: “No, I didn’t say that. I said their nuclear weapons would be destroyed.”
Tehran read the result its own way. A written message attributed to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said that those who hope for “a shift between political parties” in Washington are “gravely mistaken,” and that “Any repetition of aggression will take on far broader dimensions.” Two sources close to Gulf government circles told Reuters that a full-scale assault on Iran “now looks less likely.” Brent crude fell 8.7 percent on the day, to $94.62. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had pressed the President in their weekend call for another round after the election, the Associated Press reports. On Wednesday President Isaac Herzog began asking Israel’s parties whom to task with forming a government, and by early afternoon Eastern Gadi Eisenkot had 56 recommendations to Netanyahu’s 49. A deal or another round will still be settled before the gavels change hands, if it is decided at all.
Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday “We are going to end the war,” and that “the Founding Fathers had the power of the purse as one of the ways of deterring a president who does war without the consent of the American people.” Hakeem Jeffries listed ending the Iran war among what House Democrats “will deliver on Day One,” and Time reports that House Democrats plan a resolution in the first week of January requiring the President to end the war or obtain authorization to continue it. The President said on Tuesday night that he is “absolutely willing to accept those results” and will “work with the Democrats,” then posted a picture of a red cap that read VETO.
The committees’ questions on Iran were asked once already, from the minority, and refused. Adam Smith told CNN in September that he will examine the decision to go to war, and the March 2 letter he signed with Jim Himes, Gregory Meeks, Rosa DeLauro and Betty McCollum already lists the questions. On March 25 Meeks moved to subpoena Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The vote failed 24 to 22 on party lines. In January the same motion carries. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is the first target. CBS reported on Wednesday that the President has been asking advisers whether Hegseth should stay. The White House said he “has full confidence in Secretary Hegseth,” and the President, asked if he would replace him, said “No, I think he’s doing a very good job.” Jeffries told a California rally that in the majority “one of the first things that we are going to do is to run Pete Hegseth out of town.” On Wednesday he said of impeaching the President, “I haven’t had a single member of the House Democratic Caucus talk to me about impeachment.” Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie told Roll Call on October 26 that he will force a vote on his eight-article impeachment resolution the week of November 9, “if he’s still in the job,” and gives it “better than a 50 percent chance of passing.”
On the domestic file the questions run the other way. In August Raskin opened an inquiry into a whistleblower’s claim that the outcomes of the Justice Department’s antisemitism investigations of Harvard, Brown and Columbia were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence.” Every Democrat on Ted Cruz’s Judiciary subcommittee stayed away from his August hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood and called it a “political creepshow.” Whitehouse was one of the five. The Education and Workforce Committee’s work on campus antisemitism and the Qatari gifts passes to Bobby Scott. Gerard Filitti of the Lawfare Project, which litigates those cases, told JNS last month what to expect: “the hearings on universities and K-12 stop, the majority staff reports stop.” The Combating International Islamophobia Act passed the last Democratic House 219 to 212 with every Democrat who voted in favor.
The President said on Fox News on Tuesday morning: “Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal that we give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we’re stopping.” He added that “by the end of this year we won’t be paying Israel.” No explanation followed on Wednesday from the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon, and none from Netanyahu’s office; Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Israel’s Finance Ministry had no advance word. AIPAC said on Tuesday that it supports “the current MOU, which is set to expire next year.” The Congress that will write any aid after this year was Democratic in both chambers by Wednesday morning. Jeffries wrote to his caucus on July 14 that “Israel has an advanced economy and is capable of paying for its own sophisticated weapons.” He also wrote that “a new security arrangement should undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge against Iran.” J Street’s April memo asked the United States to “phase out direct financial support for arms sales to Israel and treat Israel as it does other wealthy US allies.” The Forum’s May report said the aid “ends from a position of mutual strength, not American withdrawal,” and described what replaces it: joint development, co-production and preferential access to dual-use innovation. Three documents from three camps describe the same outcome after 2028, and on Wednesday the Vice President listed “Change our relationship to Israel” among what the voters who left his party want. The disputes are over terms and conditions, and those are the Forum’s work for 2027.
The votes show how many Democrats can be worked with, and where that stops. On July 15, 103 House Democrats voted to strike the $3.3 billion outright. On April 15, 40 of the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus backed at least one of Bernie Sanders’s resolutions against arms sales to Israel. The seven who opposed both included Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Coons. The new senators split. Roy Cooper, Sherrod Brown and Chris Pappas have backed the aid. Troy Jackson says he will “never vote in favor of US taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel.” James Talarico would stop offensive weapons and keep Iron Dome. Adam Hamilton would also cut the offensive aid. Abdul El-Sayed, asked on 60 Minutes whether Israel has a right to exist, answered yes, “if there is a shared understanding.” Five House members backed by the Democratic Socialists of America arrive pledged to cut off the aid, and none has yet committed to Jeffries for Speaker. J Street said on Wednesday that “a majority of the Democrats in both chambers will be J Street-endorsed.”
Democrats took five governorships from Republicans, in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas. They will hold at least 28 of the 50 by NBC’s results, with Kansas and Alaska still open, the first Democratic majority of governors since 2010. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott; she takes office on January 19. Nathan Johnson won the open attorney general’s office and replaces Paxton on January 12. Dan Patrick lost the lieutenant governorship to Vikki Goodwin, whom CAIR’s political arm lists as a preferred candidate. CAIR and its Texas chapter congratulated Hinojosa, Talarico and Johnson on Wednesday and called the result a rejection of “Texas politicians who fanned the flames of hate against American Muslims.”
Texas matters most on this file. Governor Abbott’s proclamation of November 18, 2025 named the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR foreign terrorist organizations under the Penal Code. It also barred both from buying land, as transnational criminal entities, under a 2025 Property Code statute that lets the governor “remove a designation.” Hinojosa can rescind the proclamation once she is sworn in, and the statute lets her lift the land bar. As a state representative she voted in 2023 against the law that wrote foreign terrorist organizations into the Penal Code, and so did Talarico. Neither she nor Johnson mentioned the designations on Wednesday. Attorney General Paxton’s February suit in Collin County asks a court to declare CAIR and the Brotherhood terrorist organizations. It is Johnson’s to drop or to pursue. The new officers cannot undo the statutes on their own, or Judge Alan Albright’s May order in CAIR’s own federal suit. That order requires the CAIR Foundation to name foreign donors of $5,000 or more from 2021 through 2024 and to produce Nihad Awad’s travel itineraries. The plaintiffs can settle with new defendants, but the records already ordered do not come back.
Florida does not change hands. Byron Donalds won the governorship and James Uthmeier the attorney general’s office. The designation of CAIR, the Brotherhood and Antifa that the Governor and Cabinet approved on September 29 takes effect on Thursday. CAIR has suspended its Florida operations: a sign on its Temple Terrace office blames the state’s “baseless and unconstitutional enforcement,” and its national site is refusing donations from the state. Chief Judge Allen Winsor heard CAIR’s motion to block the designation on October 28 and had not ruled by Wednesday afternoon. Indiana’s and Tennessee’s new laws stand as well. Eighteen states now write the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into law, eight of them since April 2025. Wisconsin’s was signed in March by a Democrat, Tony Evers.
Democratic governors have acted on antisemitism when the ask was specific. Kathy Hochul signed the law requiring a Title VI coordinator on every New York campus. Dana Nessel charged the University of Michigan encampment protesters, and when she dropped the last cases in 2025 she said, “I stand by those charges.” Josh Shapiro’s office said on Wednesday that a bicycle protest planned for Sunday against six Jewish- and Israeli-owned Philadelphia businesses “is nothing more than blatant antisemitism.” None of them has acted against CAIR or a Brotherhood-linked body as such. The Forum’s Michigan asks of October 29 went to Democrats: suspend refugee subawards to the Islamic Center of Detroit pending review, publish the school-meal site reviews behind $43.7 million, and say whether the lieutenant governor will withdraw his tribute. None has answered.
City Hall in New York is unchanged. Zohran Mamdani revoked the city’s IHRA and anti-boycott orders in his first hours in office on January 1. The four Jewish organizations that reviewed his September antisemitism plan welcomed parts of it but said it “fails to address a central issue that the Mayor himself has perpetuated.”
The votes of the last four years name the partners. Thirty-one House Democrats voted for the DETERRENT Act in March 2025, among them Josh Gottheimer, Jared Moskowitz, Greg Landsman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Tom Suozzi, Chris Pappas and Henry Cuellar. Moskowitz is the Democratic lead on Mario Díaz-Balart’s bill to put the Muslim Brotherhood designations in statute, and he is in line to chair the Foreign Affairs subcommittee for the Middle East. In August 2024 Gottheimer led 46 members of both parties in demanding full use of the Hezbollah sanctions laws. He and Dan Goldman co-led the 39-member letter on Turkey’s harboring of Hamas that followed the Forum’s briefings. John Fetterman said of the February strikes: “I might be a Democrat, but in this specific case, the president is absolutely correct to do these kinds of actions.”
The state partners are named the same way. Hochul ordered CUNY to carry out all 13 of Judge Lippman’s recommendations. Wes Moore signed the law that ended CAIR’s guaranteed seat on Maryland’s hate-crimes commission, along with every other group’s, after it passed both chambers without a dissenting vote. Each acted when the ask was narrow, documented and put in that official’s own terms. That is how the Forum’s Turkey letter drew signatures from both sides of the aisle, and why I could say in June, announcing the coalition on CAIR, that “Republican governors, Democratic attorneys general, and presidential administrations of opposing parties reached the same conclusion.”
I draw six conclusions.
First, the two years were good because the asks were specific and the officials who could act on them did. What Tuesday changes is who asks the next questions, in Washington and in Austin.
Second, the Iran decision still belongs to the President, and the eight weeks before January 3 are the window in which he decides without a Democratic Congress watching. He agreed on Wednesday that the war cost the election, said he would do it again, and said “we continue to do it.” A deal or a strike will be settled in the lame-duck session, if at all. The Forum’s work with the appropriators who write December’s money belongs in the next five weeks.
Third, the aid is now a three-sided negotiation among the President, Netanyahu and a Democratic Congress whose House leader has written his terms. The Forum’s May framework is the most detailed of the three documents on the mechanics.
Fourth, the domestic file moves from the committee room to the courtroom and the statehouse. The Education and Workforce hearings will stop, as Filitti expects. The Albright order, the Michigan indictments, the Florida designation and the Indiana and Tennessee statutes do not. The Forum’s Michigan project was built for this: evidence that any official of either party can open without a chairman’s permission.
Fifth, Texas is the test of whether a Democratic governor will rescind a designation of CAIR that a federal judge has not enjoined in nearly a year of litigation. The law lets her, and the Forum will ask her in public.
Sixth, the partners exist, in both chambers and in the statehouses. The Forum has not asked a member’s party before asking for a vote.
I took no side in Tuesday’s vote. The asks go to the new chairmen by name.
The first is the DETERRENT Act. The Senate’s education committee, under Bernie Sanders from January, has held it since March 2025. The ask to Bobby Scott and to Sanders is to move it in the form a 26-organization coalition endorsed in May.
The second is the Brotherhood in statute, through the Díaz-Balart and Moskowitz bill (Díaz-Balart’s own race was still uncalled on Wednesday) and Ted Cruz’s companion, so the designations survive the next administration of either party. Moskowitz’s subcommittee is the venue.
The third is CAIR. Chip Roy’s bill has no Democratic cosponsor and dies with this Congress on January 3, so the ask moves to the money: the debarment inquiry Health and Human Services opened on June 9, and appropriations language requiring every department to report which of its grantees a state has designated.
The fourth is the foreign-assistance inspector general’s office, which Jeanne Shaheen’s amendment with Jim Risch would preserve and which Coons takes up as chairman.
The fifth is Qatar. Its major non-NATO ally status and the executive-order guarantee of September 2025 should be conditioned on the closure of Hamas’s political office in Doha and on prosecutions of Treasury-designated financiers.
The sixth is the Iranian people: the supplemental the Forum asked for in March, spent as Seth Kaplan’s October report sets out. Coons called the February strikes illegal but said the regime “has the blood of many Americans on its hands.” He can carry it in the Senate.
The seventh is the successor framework for Israel, signed by the end of fiscal 2027 with co-development, the qualitative edge and technology control written in. The Forum will put its May paper in front of Jeffries, Meeks and Coons as the text to mark up.
The eighth is the Michigan questions, now put to Texas as well: to Hinojosa in Austin, and to Governor Whitmer and Governor-elect Jocelyn Benson in Lansing, which religious institutions receive school-meal, refugee and security-grant money passed through the state, and what is preached in them.
House Democrats who voted on March 27, 2025 for the DETERRENT Act, which cuts the reporting threshold for foreign gifts to universities to $50,000 and to zero for countries of concern. It passed 241 to 169 and has waited in the Senate’s education committee since March 31, 2025.
This month I give four California lunches on Iran and the new Congress: Palo Alto on the 9th takes technology and export controls, San Francisco on the 10th asks who decides after the war, Los Angeles on the 13th reads the midterm map, and San Diego on the 16th is on sea power. Michael Rubin briefs Philadelphia on November 5 on Israel’s next war and Washington a day later on Erdoğan’s Turkey. Benjamin Baird takes the fight against Islamism and Iran in the new Congress to New York, December 3.
Clear this week. When it should not be, write [email protected]; corrections run here, in print.
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